February 22, 2019 – e-cigs and Quitting

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Anchor lead: Electronic cigarettes outperform other smoking cessation aids, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Smokers who were attempting to quit who used e-cigarettes to assist them were successful more often and remained nonsmokers in greater numbers than those who used other nicotine replacement aids, a recent study found. Michael Blaha, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins, describes the findings.

Blaha: More smokers quit smoking in the electronic cigarette arm than in the traditional nicotine replacement therapy arm. About 18% quitting in the e-cigarette group and about 10% with the nicotine replacement group. Now there’s some good and some bad in this study. The good is that more people quit using electronic cigarettes.  The bad is of course that 80% or more people still remained smoking at the end of the trial. And unfortunately, of those people that were randomized to electronic cigarettes, that remained smokers, 20% of them continued using electronic cigarettes as well, and are now so called duel users. :30

Blaha notes that there is clearly still a lot of room to develop effective aids to help people stop smoking, but that the best strategy remain avoidance of all nicotine products. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.